The Third-Person Singular Neuter Possessives in Early Modern English Sermons : A Sociolinguistic Approach to Language Practices of Early Modern English Sermon Writers (original) (raw)

My/mine, thy/thine: aspects of their distribution in Early Modern English

Vienna English Working Papers (VIEWS) 2(2), 110-19, 1993

This paper was the first to argue that the different variants of the Early Modern English possessive pronouns my/mine, thy/thine do not represent 'free variation' but correlate with linguistic and extralinguistic variables and thus constitute a case of a '(socio)linguistic variable'. The study is based on a small corpus of EModE texts representing different text types, registers and authors.

The development of [] strengthened'possessive pronouns in English

Language Sciences, 2002

This paper investigates the developments of 'strengthened' possessives such as hers and hern (earlier her) through a fresh examination of a substantial number of Middle English texts. These forms are first found in North Midlands and West Midlands texts of the thirteenth century, with the later-n forms of Southeastern dialects representing dative case rather than true 'strengthened' possessives. While the-s forms developed in rather different ways, both resulted in a processing advantage, as they signal to the hearer that no head NP is following. It is suggested that considerations of language processing have the potential to give more coherence to the traditional concept of 'analogy'.

The Beginning of the End: The Decline of External Possessors in Old English

The loss of the DATIVE EXTERNAL POSSESSOR (DEP) as a productive construction in English has been regarded as setting English apart from most European languages. While this claim can be disputed, the loss of this construction in English needs an explanation. Both internal and external explanations have been suggested, but we lack a solid empirical base for evaluating them. This article supplies the beginnings of the empirical foundation necessary for further discussion of this topic by presenting the results of a systematic corpus-based study of external possessors with body parts playing the role of subject or (accusative) object in Early Old English. This investigation establishes that any explanation for the eventual loss of DEPs must be compatible with the fact that the construction was already reduced at an early stage in Old English compared with Gothic and although productive, was more limited in its range and use. The DEP was not obligatory even in the situations that favored it, and it varied with the INTERNAL POSSESSOR (IP), the unmarked possessive construction. Contact with Brythonic Celtic at an early stage provides a possible explanation for this early decline.

Possessives and determiners in Old English

Studies in Language Companion Series, 2006

This paper investigates the properties of two constructions in Old English (OE) in which a possessive and a determiner co-occur. The Det Poss construction, in which the determiner precedes a possessive, is well known and is similar to constructions found in many other languages. The Poss Det construction, with the opposite order, is much less well documented and when discussed at all, has usually been treated as a variant of the Det Poss construction. However, a systematic examination of a large corpus shows that the two constructions had different properties and require different analyses. I argue that the typologically unusual Poss Det construction, found only with adjectives, was possible because adjective phrases could be complements to determiners in OE.

On the dual nature of the ‘possessive’ marker in Modern English

1997

This paper shows, after Watkins (1967) and Tremblay (1989, 1991), that the possessive phrase of This is John's does not necessarily include an elliptical Possessee. This ambiguity is argued to arise from the dual nature of the possessive marker, which may either be inflectional or derivational in Modern English. In the first case, it may be analysed as a functional head, as proposed by Abney (1987) and Kayne (1993, 1994); in the second case, it operates in the lexicon, deriving possessive adjectives which exhibit complementary morphological and semantic properties in adnominal and predicate positions.

Of Varying Language and Opposing Creed": New Insights into Late Modern English

2007

This volume includes a selection of fifteen papers delivered at the Second International Conference on Late Modern English. The chapters focus on significant linguistic aspects of the Late Modern English period, not only on grammatical issues such as the development of pragmatic markers, for-to infinitive constructions, verbal subcategorisation, progressive aspect, sentential complements, double comparative forms or auxiliary/negator cliticisation but also on pronunciation, dialectal variation and other practical aspects such as corpus compilation, which are approached from different perspectives (descriptive, cognitive, syntactic, corpus-driven).

Early Modern Printed Sermons as Evidence for Idiolect: Lancelot Andrewes' Use of Third-Person Singular Inflection

Yadomi, Hiroshi, 2024

X# • (2 0 2 4^6 ^3 0 h) wave sociolinguistic analysis: rather, it seeks to evaluate the reliability of printed materials as evidence for idiolects, thereby underpinning the foundation for historical sociolinguistic research, as demonstrated by Yadomi (2019) and aforementioned studies. Large-scale corpora have hugely contributed to our understanding of language variation and change during the Early Modern period. These corpora include Helsinki Corpus (HC), Corpus of Early English Correspondence (CEEC), Corpus of English Dialogues 1560-1760 (CED), Corpus of English Religious Prose (COERP), and the more recent Early-Modern Multiloquent Authors (EMMA, Petre et al. 2019). Such collections primarily employ printed texts as source material, though some corpora such as CEEC and EMMA, are designed to facilitate idiolect analysis. Nevalainen and her colleagues compiled the CEEC and their research significantly advanced our understanding of the interplay between language and society during the Early Modern period, with particular attention to individual language users (Raumolin-Brunberg 2005, 2006, 2009; Nevalainen et al. 2011; Navalainen &Raumolin-Brunberg 2017). The CEEC comprises letters mainly from edited collections, supplemented by a select number of original manuscripts. In instances where the editions are considered problematic, cross-referencing with the original manuscripts is conducted. This ensures cautious representation of individual language use in printed texts. Nevalainen &Raumolin-Brunberg (2003: 45) elucidate that the CEEC "has been designed to provide access to the language of individual informants". They acknowledge, however, that "the CEEC is areliable tool for research on grammar, lexis and pragmatics but not necessarily for orthography and phonology" (44). When printed texts are used for linguistic analysis, especially idiolectal (2)

The spread of the new pronominal possessive construction: A variationist approach to the letters of the Middle and New Kingdom

Forthcoming in: Eitan Grossman & Stéphane Polis (eds.), Possession in Ancient Egyptian. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter

This paper is a variationist sociolinguistic investigation into the emergence and rise of the innovative pAy-f possessive construction in Middle and Late Egyptian. The study uses 889 tokens from Egyptian letters, ranging from Dynasty 12 to Dynasty 21, to study the variation between this construction and the more traditional noun + clitic possessive. Statistical analyses were conducted using the program Goldvarb, which uses a logistic regression model, ideal for natural language data. This model allows us to determine what external (social) and internal (linguistic) factors contribute to an Egyptian writer’s choice of the new pAy-f variant or the traditional one. Results indicate that time period was a significant contributing external factor – the new variant rises in usage over time. Significant internal factors include noun type and gender of the possessum, with names, body parts, and family member nouns favouring the old variant; this effect was stronger for masculine nouns than for feminine nouns. Possessum noun number also played a role: plural nouns favour the new construction while singular nouns show no preference and dual nouns favour the old construction. Finally, possessor clitic person features were also significant: first person clitics favoured the new form, while second person clitics favoured the old. These results shed new light on the nature of possessive variation in Egyptian, and on the nature of language change. They are also indicative of the scientific advances that are made available when the methodology of modern variationist sociolinguistics is put to use on such ancient data.